Conventionally, surveys or polls are a series of questions on a form presented to individuals, called voters, to sample the views of people in a given region or country for political, commercial or entertainment purposes. Surveys are typically conducted either in person, mail, or via telephone to a great number of individual voters. Consequently, the task of conducting a survey and tabulating the results of a survey is time consuming which delays obtaining the results of the survey, and furthermore, the results of the survey either are not available to the individuals who took the survey, or are sent to them at a later time when the entire survey is completed. It is often the individuals taking a survey who are the ones most interested in how their votes or opinions compare with others. In addition, voters in different countries or regions of a country may have different national languages, but surveys are typically provided in only the most common languages of a country or region, limiting the scope of individuals who can take the survey.
With the development of the Internet and its growing widespread use, individuals in countries throughout the world can now connect to a network site and receive pages of information via their computers and browser software. No site however has yet provided a mechanism for enabling individuals to participate in surveys in different languages or to review the results of such surveys. Although some sites require users to answer a static series of questions in a single language, for example, a user's name, E-mail address, or credit card information, they are not for survey purposes but for registering individuals to use facilities offered by the site. The results of such questions are not shared with the users, but are only accessible by system administrators.
Furthermore, with respect to registration, typically registration questions at a web site are limited to a single language, usually in English, or in the language of the users anticipated connecting to the site. This limits the scope of individuals who can register with a site, and moreover, can lead to incorrect information if the language of the site is not comprehended by the user.
Several proposed system have been developed for allowing a program to offer messages in different languages such as described, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,595,980, 5,428,772 and 5,583,761. However such systems do not provide an integrated solution for surveys in multiple languages over a network or for registration in multiple languages, but are limited to enhancing the language capability of a user interface of an application program operating on a computer.